Fedora 30 Beta Released, Chef Releasing All of Its Software as Open Source, elementary Adopting Flatpak for AppCenter, Unreal Engine 4.22 Now Available and VMware Lawsuit Dropped

Fedora
30 Beta was released yesterday. Highlights include new desktop
environment choices, DNF performance improvements, GNOME 3.32 and updated
versions of many packages, such as Golang, Bash, Python and more. For more
details, see the Fedora 30
Change set.

Chef has announced it is releasing all of its software as open source.
According to DevOps.com,
"Chef has decided to open source its entire portfolio of IT automation
software as part of an effort to make it easier for organizations to
construct a DevOps pipeline using the company's software. A part of that
effort, Chef also launched the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack—which
combines Chef Infra for managing infrastructure, Chef InSpec for
maintaining compliance, Chef Habitat for managing applications, Chef
Automate for managing hybrid clouds and Chef Workstation, a starter kit for
launching Chef—within a single distribution of Chef software. Chef
Infra is the original Chef project around which the company was launched."

elementary
announced it is adopting Flatpak for AppCenter and its third-party
developer ecosystem. The post makes clear that "while Flathub is a
great place to get popular cross-platform apps, we still want AppCenter to
be the best place to get apps that are specially developed for elementary
OS." Also from the announcement: "Moving to Flatpak doesn't mean moving
away from our focus on native apps, from enabling developers to get paid
with pay-what-you-want downloads, or from the online AppCenter Dashboard
where each app is carefully tested, reviewed, and curated before being
published to users in AppCenter. We'll be providing our own hosted and
curated Flatpak repo for AppCenter, much like we provide our own hosted and
curated Debian repo today."

Unreal
Engine 4.22 is now available. Major features with this new release
include real-time ray tracing and path tracing, high-level rendering
refactor, C++ iteration time improvements and much more. According to the Unreal
Engine announcement, "This release includes 174 improvements submitted by
the incredible community of Unreal Engine developers on GitHub!"

Linux developer Christopher Helwig has dropped the VMware lawsuit after a
German court dismissed the case. ZDNet
reports that "after the German Hamburg Higher Regional Court dismissed
Helwig's appeal, he has decided that it would be pointless to appeal the
decision." ZDNet summarized the background: "The heart of the lawsuit had
been that Hypervisor vSphere VMware ESXi 5.5.0 violated Linux's copyright.
That's because VMware had not licensed a derivative work from Linux under
the GNU General Public License (GPL). True, VMware had disclosed the
vmklinux component under the GPL, but not the associated hypervisor
components. Or, as Helwig put it, 'VMware uses a badly hacked 2.4 kernel with a big
binary blob hooked into it, giving a derived work of the Linux kernel
that's not legally redistributable.'" See the article
for more details on the history of the case.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology,The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads. You can contact Jill via e-mail, [email protected]